A Twist on Grandmother’s Singaporean Braised Duck

“I can already hear my mother scolding me: ‘You should find something more special to cook!’ ” Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan confessed. “But, you know, Asian parents — you’ll find a thousand ways to disappoint them before breakfast.” Or dinner, depending on the time of day. Just off a publicity tour for her novel, “Sarong Party Girls,” set in Singapore, Tan and I were talking about making the sweet soy-sauce-braised duck she grew up eating there. Special or not, it was a dish I was excited to make with her, because Singaporean food isn’t easy to find in New York, or in the United States, for that matter.

There are just about 36,000 Singaporean immigrants in America, and only about 1,000 have arrived in New York City in the past five years, according to the United States Census Bureau. Few restaurants serve Singaporean food, and the ones that do usually offer a greatest-hits collection of dishes, 40 or 60 or 100 on one menu. It’s an awkward way to serve the cuisine of a country whose most important natural resource are perhaps the street-food cooks who spend their entire lives mastering just one dish. These are cooks who know, say, exactly how many shakes they will give their fried prawn noodles before they are seared just-so in their woks, or who know that their herbal pork-rib soups are at their best three hours and seven minutes after their stands open. Cooks who have to make dozens of different dishes a night can’t have the same touch.

The scarcity of Singaporean food here is distressing for a people who not only pride themselves on their cuisine but whose national identity can be said to be wrapped up in it. Singapore is a polyglot society of Chinese and Indians from different regions and native Malays, with Eurasians and foreigners in the mix. Most families are in various stages of creolization, from the old Peranakans (Chinese who intermarried with Malays hundreds of years ago) to people like the grandmother of the chef Nicholas Tang. She arrived in Singapore as a girl in the 1920s from Fujian, China, and was adopted by a Peranakan family, who taught her to make a chicken curry, aromatic with Indian spices and a Malay paste of coconut, lemongrass, ginger and onion. Tang serves that curry now as a special at DBGB, the French bistro in Manhattan where he is the chef, as a homage to his heritage, but with French technical flourishes.

“My generation tends to cook widely,” Tan said. “We’re as likely to cook pasta as hot pot. We pride ourselves on having a diverse society, and when we talk about our ethnic differences, it’s often about our food, acknowledging that you make this thing differently than me. Everyone celebrates everyone else’s festivals — my family is Chinese, but I grew up celebrating Hari Raya and Diwali as much as Christmas — because we all get to eat each other’s food.”

And so, when we talked about other dishes that may be more “special,” Tan also suggested otak otak, a Peranakan mackerel pâté, minced with fatty nuts, wrapped in banana leaves and grilled until set and smoky. Or a Boxing Day curry, made from bits of roast beef or ham or goose left over from your proper English Christmas dinner. But we settled on her braised duck, because Tan remembers it on her grandmother’s stove every time she visited, and she most wanted to share what she called “our daily food, the things you wouldn’t think to share with other people because they’re not special enough.”

It was a simple process — she caramelized some sugar, “fried” some aromatics in it, poured in sweet soy sauce and settled the duck into the pan to gently simmer for an hour or so, before dropping in some fried tofu and boiled eggs to absorb that darkly rich sauce. As the duck cooked, she noted that she uses star anise in the braise, which isn’t traditional. But it adds an extra layer of memory: Its cinnamon-fennel scent is a feature of braised pork dishes she grew up with, and having it in her New York home now is a way of shortening the distance to Singapore. She pulled the duck out before it was fully cooked, a touch of pink signifying a Western preference.

“Every time I cook my grandmother’s food, I feel like I’m desecrating her memory,” Tan said, laughing a little nervously. But as we ate, the duck’s rich, round fat wound together the flavors of star anise and ginger, and the bites of tofu released waves of savory, syrupy sauce, and I told her I was sure that her grandmother would be just fine with this.